Lousy Sex: Creating Self in an Infectious World

10. The Rock Collector

145 10 The Rock Collector Human lives are stories of collections—words, coins, stamps, lovers—collections of things we once felt we must have. But as we age, most of us find time for fewer and fewer of these things. The last of life is an exploration, an expedition in which our very selves are at risk. Now the things we choose to keep must be of great importance. January 16, 1912, six days before my father was born, Robert Falcon Scott and his team reached the southern pole of the planet. “Great God,” he wrote in his diary. “This is an awful place.” It was twenty-one below zero. Thewindwasblowingatfortymilesperhourandhowlinginhisearslike thedead.ThemenhadwalkedformonthsintheworstweatheronEarth. Their ponies had died weeks ago. A poor choice—those ponies. So the menthemselveshadpulledalltheirsuppliesoverhundredsofmiles of ice. And now the wind and the sleet lashed at them as though they deserved it. Few men have experienced the full, flat fist of misery. Scott and his men were living it, or so they thought. Then things got worse. DOI: 10.5876/9781607322337:c10 l o u s y s e x 146 “I’m going to have my tombstone moved away from your mother’s. Down to the other end of that row,” Dad says to me. Curiously, during his last few years, most of what my father and I share, we share in Perkins restaurants. Neither of us intended for it to end like this. It just has. As usual, we are sitting across from one another in a leatherette booth, and the course of our conversation is as familiar as the floor tiles here. No one else wanted him, not really. My father could be a handful. Five foot seven or so, 135 pounds, his nose broken one too many times by surgeons hoping to save the rest of his face, deep brown eyes under a thinning layer of silvery hair. And hands brown spotted with age and roughed up by years of steel flanges and oily wrenches. Handsome enough. But he can be mean—thoughtlessly , and sometimes thoughtfully, mean. We’re a lot alike, me and this old man. He and Mom came to live in Fort Collins to be near me and my wife, Gina. Two years later, my mother died. Deep into her dementia, my mother’s heart gave out. Bless her heart. Her death nearly killed my father, and that angered him. Not because it nearly killed him, but because it didn’t completely kill him. Poking at the ham and turkey in his chef ’s salad, he says, “I don’t want to spend eternity next to her. Not after what she did to me. It was a shitty thing to do.” My father is ninety years old. I’m fifty-six. People say we look a lot alike. Since my father came to live in this city, things have changed. At first we both had great hopes and intentions. The day he arrived we spoke almost boyishly about all we would do together. But now it feels like we are unraveling, like the last of this winter will never end. His left eye squints at me from across the laminated table top. Four years ago, in a fierce snow and ice storm, a virus tried to steal that eye from my father. He and I wouldn’t let that happen. But treatment involved sewing his eye shut. That night, one-eyed, he drove off with my mother into the teeth of a Utah blizzard . Against the odds, he made it home, but that eye was never the same. The squint is permanent. T h e R o c k C o l l e c t o r 147 Right now, though, my father’s other eye stares at me with the same feral indignity. We slide deeper into our conversation, a conversation full of thorns and scorpions. His sausage-like fingers push his salad around the chipped, white plate while I watch. I try to divert him, before he really gets going. “How’s your salad?” He doesn’t fall for it. “I know just when she did it, too. You know how I know? It was all she could talk about while we were dating.” “You want some more salad dressing?” “And that morning, the morning after Shorty fired her, that was the first time she could get away while I was at work. If I had...